Creatomatic is 3. (And a bit.)

Kit Allen 13th of October 2015

It’s becoming an informal tradition that we mark company birthdays with a) a full-on night on the town, and b) a quick round-up of what we’ve been up to over the last 12 months.

While we managed Part A quite effectively – with the collective team taken to the uber friendly Electric Fields festival, at nearby Drumlanrig Castle for the day. Part B got held back for various reasons (see below). So now we’re reviewing the year, plus a couple of extra bonus months too…

We said bye to Megan at the end of August. She’s now safely installed at uni and learning how to nurse, which we’re sure won’t be much of a change from the office – high pressure work with blood, screaming, extreme pain and the daily risk of infection, and we’re sure that nursing is pretty hard going too.

In her place now sits titan of design Paul Gardner. Formally of Twinty Fower and Eskdale, he’s been on our radar for years, and we’re utterly delighted to have him in our little team. We think that he’s coping quite well, though – he’s started making appalling puns about his work today, so we’re obviously breaking him in.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working as hard as ever designing, building and crafting websites for companies around the world. New projects for Natural Power, a set of author microsites via Peters Fraser & Dunlop and dedicated internal system developments for Dundas and Kilnford have all kept us busy. Oh, and we also installed a Nerf gun wall.

As a whole, the industry has seen some interesting changes over the past twelve months. We’re seeing more and more convergence from a design standpoint over various online web builders and WordPress, as new designers take advantage of an ever-growing library of off-the-shelf themes available: Louder Than Ten published an excellent article on this a couple of months ago, for further reading.

While one might assume this new competition poses a threat – and yes, it does, to a certain extent – it actually highlights the custom work we do with WordPress: because it’s not limited to a cookie-cutter theme, we’re able to build sites around our clients needs and requirements, with a flexibility that comes from years of code experience. (There’s a future blog post in here, I suspect.)

So – what’s coming up in 2016?

‘More of the same’ is the slightly boring answer. We’ve got a couple of very interesting ongoing projects which we’re looking forward to launching before the end of 2015; we’ve got an internal project which we’re still keeping under wraps for the moment; and we’ll keep on bringing you updates from the front line of the Internet as we go.

Kit